Long had I heard that in mathematics sharing and crediting of new ideas happened outside of the normal publishing routes, recently through online channels prior to review. Even journals like Science and Nature tolerate this kind of posting. As others have pointed out, posting at places like arXiv should not increase your chance of getting scooped, but decrease it. According to Jabberwocky, journals in ecology have been behind the times, but are beginning to understand the value of this kind of sharing. The way we exchange information is changing fast, often for the better. The faster we can find out about what others are doing in our field, the better. Though I am not sure what this does for highly competitive fields like cancer biology.

I would love to hear from people who have had experience with posting in arXiv or similar places. Do people comment? Do you get to improve your science? Get credit for priority before publishing? Is it worth it?

9 Responses to Do you know you can post prior to publication at arXiv?

Priority is one of the big reasons given for using preprints in some fields. The first group to post to arXiv is considered to have precedence. The other big benefit I’ve seen discussed is the improved speed of communication (e.g., http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/science-f-yeah.html). With preprints we know what is happening now, not what was happening 12 months ago.

Well, fine, Ethan, you posted MY link… 😉 I recently convinced some colleagues to post their article on evolutionarily stable strategies to arXiv, and it got picked up by Nature News (http://www.nature.com/news/physicists-suggest-selfishness-can-pay-1.11254) and others. The interesting thing here is that they quickly received e-mails from other groups working in the same area who were a few days or weeks behind — but because Adami and Hintze posted to arXiv they got the first round of publicity. It’s still in review AFAIK.

I don’t know the answers to Joan’s questions, but will be interested to see the discussion. I thought I’d offer that there are some other possibly relevant repositories to consider, for example, Cogprints http://cogprints.org/ , Philosophy of Science Archive http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/, PeerJ Preprints (in development) https://peerj.com/about/#PeerJ-PrePrints. None of them seem to be nearly as active as ArXiv. Even Nature Publishing Group experimented with this a bit with Nature Precedings http://precedings.nature.com/ but they are no longer accepting new submissions. Some institutional repositories would probably accept preprints which would be findable using various Internet search engines but this doesn’t seem quite as good as a heavily used subject repostory; and some institutional repositories will accept only peer-reviewed content.

Not sure how true this is. I have a manuscript in revision in a high-profile journal, and was told that any release of results would be grounds for rejection (if before acceptance) or embargo violation (after acceptance).

Nobody broke any of the rules they are subjected to. The journalist may have not been very nice, but he’s not subject to the rules set by Nature. One may argue that a science journalist who does that will not have a very fruitful career, which is true. But tons of commentary on science is published in third-rate paper & blogs who care more about selling ads than integrity and long-term engagement.